Improved efficiency for respiratory motion compensation in three-dimensional flow measurements

Background Phase contrast (PC) CMR is clinically used for in-vivo assessment of blood flow in cardiovascular disease [1]. Typically, a through-plane 2D acquisition is performed for evaluating the blood flow. Recently, 3D time-resolved PC CMR has been used for quantification and visualization of the blood flow in all three directions of a volume [2]. However, such acquisitions require long scan times, which are further prolonged by the need for respiratory motion compensation, typically using respiratory navigators. In this study, we hypothesized that respiratory gating the center of k-space only will yield similar measurements to a fully respiratory-gated acquisition, since the phase information is mainly coming from the central k-space, and evaluated these two gating approaches.